Starting on Thursday 11/12/2026 around 11:15am ET, Microsoft experienced a worldwide outage in which Microsoft 365 (M365) Exchange email servers, as well as other services, were unavailable. Essent systems, like EssentOne, that send email notifications do not transport via Exchange email servers, so the systems continued to send email, but many email recipients that use Microsoft 365 were not able to receive the sent email. As a result, these email messages were queued up in EssentOne for future delivery.
As recipients' email services resumed, EssentOne resent any failed email from 11/12/2026 to 11/13/2026 with the exception of password reset emails (due to their security- and time-sensitive nature). Essent Support confirmed that all installations that queued emails have been resent; however, Essent cannot confirm that they reached their destination after entering Microsoft’s domain.
Actions to Take:
It is recommended that subscribers review any communications sent from an Essent system, starting from Thursday 11/12/2026 around 11:15am ET, to ensure that your communications have been received.
Issue:
Email recipients using M365 Exchange Online, the Microsoft-hosted email service, and by extension connecting email clients like Outlook, could not send or receive email.
Impact:
Microsoft 365 subscribers that use Exchange Online email could not send or receive messages. Email sent from any system could not be delivered to any affected system.
The popular press and Outlook users will interpret this as an Outlook outage, when in fact it is an email server infrastructure failure.
Any mail server attempting to send email to any M365 email server during the outage. Any email client attempting to send or receive email from an affected M365 email server failed during the outage.
Essent Service Impact:
Essent systems like EssentOne that send email notifications do not transport via Exchange email servers, so the systems continued to send email, but many email recipients that use Microsoft 365 were not able to receive the sent email. As a result, these email messages were queued in EssentOne for future delivery.
As recipients' email services resumed, EssentOne resent any queued email from 11/12/2026 to 11/13/2026 with the exception of password reset emails (due to their security- and time-sensitive nature).
Essent Support confirmed that queued emails have been successfully sent. Essent cannot confirm that email reached their destination after entering Microsoft’s domain.
Corrective Action:
Essent systems properly reacted to the outage.
Subscribers should review any email generated during the outage timeframe to ensure the recipient received the message.
For password resets, Essent subscribers that are affected may reinitiate a reset again using the standard Password Reset link within the target Essent system.
More Information: